Energy-Conscious Memory Allocation and Deallocation for Pointer-Intensive Applications

摘要

A multi-bank memory architecture is composed of multiple memory banks, each of which can be energy-managed independently. In this paper, we present a set of strategies for reducing energy consumption in a multi-bank memory architecture using energy-conscious dynamic memory allocation/deallocation. Applications that make dynamic memory allocations are used very frequently in mobile computingetworking area. Our strategies focus on such applications and try to cluster dynamically created data with temporal affinity in the physical address space such that the data occupy a small number of memory banks. The remaining banks can be shut off, saving energy. All of our strategies have been implemented and tested using an in-house energy simulator and an application suite that consists of nine pointer-intensive real-life applications. Our results show that all the strategies considered in this paper save energy (e.g., our user-initiated strategy saves 49% leakage energy on the average). The results also indicate that the best savings are obtained when energy-aware memory allocation/deallocation is combined with automatic data migration.